Since its inception over two decades ago, Eurostar Group has established itself as a pioneer and market leader in the digital satellite receivers industry. Over the years, the Group has diversified and expanded through entering new territories and broadening its portfolio of products / services by correctly anticipating market trends and customer requirements. The latest receiver from Eurostar is ES-C4000HD PVR. Eurostar ES-C4000HD PVR is a new class of HDTV PVR seamlessly integrated with multimedia features enhancing your TV viewing experiences. We got a chance to test this new HD receiver. By offering both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoders and decoders such as the ES-C4000HD PVR, Eurostar products let you benefit from the latest advances in compression technology to achieve significant bandwidth saving over your contribution links.

ES-C4000HD PVR is compliant with both DVB-S and the new DVB-S2 standards Front panel of ES-C4000HD PVR has several buttons for complete control of the box. The smartcard reader is there to make the pay-tv fans happy. And last but not least the four-symbol segment display in case you would be interested in the channel number currently on or other service information. A USB 2.0 slot is also situated on the front panel for updating the box and transferring files. The rear panel of ES-C4000HD PVR is even more interested. You will find there HDMI output, S/PDIF audio output for a perfect sound, RCA jacks and a power button. With the remote control almost all features of the box can be easily addressed with. The user manual will answer all your questions. As soon as you will turn on the ES-C4000HD PVR for the first time, the Installation Wizard will greet you. The selection of preferred language is the first step. On-screen menu can be displayed in various languages. The same choice you get here for the preferred audio language as well as teletext character set. Next step lets you select your time zone, daylight savings options and if you would like to set the current time manually or rather let the receiver update it automatically from the satellite stream. Thanks to the twin-HD tuner, you can record two HDTV programmes with ES-C4000HD PVR and watch one more channel at the same time. Time shift function of the current program and you can select the buffer size of time shift as far as your HDD allows. LOF frequencies can be freely entered, as well as endless DiSEqC options selected, since the receiver supports DiSEqC 1.0 and 1.2 protocols. Once all work here is done, you’re only one click away from channel search. Just plug a USB stick into the USB interface of ES-C4000HD PVR and you can play media files on your HD television. This receiver has the capacity to store 4000 TV and Radio channels.

Eurostar ES-C4000HD PVR comes with UPnP function and automatically detects your MP3 files and photos in your network and make them ready for play! 1188 TV and 217 Radio channels were found in 3 minutes. It was the fastest search as expected. The searched channels may be delete, sort and moved to one of the eight favourite lists. The channel list is still feature-loaded, allowing one-click sorting by alphabet, FTA/encrypted, provider or satellite. If you press the info button once outside of the channel list, it will bring the good old infobar, showing channel number, name, satellite, current time, availability of teletext, broadcasting format as well as SD/HD resolution. Bottom right corner contains information about the transponder frequency and SR. Second click brings up a bigger window, with a provider name, used encryption systems list and a possibility to set recording “bookmarks”, in case the channel is being recorded by PVR or if you have the time shifting mode turned on. You may connect the hard disk to the USB port on the rear panel of the receiver. The perfect HD picture we had during the regular reception was re-played from the HDD without any dropouts or glitches. It’s easy to start recording, easy to stop it. It is also easy to get back to it when it’s needed. The user first has to go to the main menu, choose “Multimedia”, then “Recorded Files”. Resolution is undoubtedly HDTVs biggest selling point. ES-C4000HD PVR resolutions are 720p and1080i. The number stands for the number of lines that create the image and the letter describes the type of scan used by the TV to display the picture.

The ES-C4000HD PVR is based on a new Linux operating system. Pressing “EPG” button once brings up a list of the upcoming events for the currently selected channel, second click opens a real program guide – you will see a big grid with event titles from current and neighbouring channels. The schedule can be zoomed in and out, and is only limited by amount of information the broad-caster is willing to share. Even if Internet is inaccessible from the receiver, you can still view photos, play MP3s or movies from your HDD.